Understanding RMON for Monitoring Service Quality
Health and performance monitoring can benefit from the remote monitoring of SNMP variables by the local SNMP agents running on each router. The SNMP agents compare MIB values against predefined thresholds and generate exception alarms without the need for polling by a central SNMP management platform. This is an effective mechanism for proactive management, as long as the thresholds have baselines determined and set correctly. For more information, see RFC 2819, Remote Network Monitoring MIB.
This topic includes the following sections:
Setting Thresholds
By setting a rising and a falling threshold for a monitored variable, you can be alerted whenever the value of the variable falls outside of the allowable operational range. (See Figure 1.)
Figure 1: Setting Thresholds
Events are only generated when the threshold is first crossed in any one direction rather than after each sample period. For example, if a rising threshold crossing event is raised, no more threshold crossing events will occur until a corresponding falling event. This considerably reduces the quantity of alarms that are produced by the system, making it easier for operations staff to react when alarms do occur.
To configure remote monitoring, specify the following pieces of information:
- The variable to be monitored (by its SNMP object identifier)
- The length of time between each inspection
- A rising threshold
- A falling threshold
- A rising event
- A falling event
Before you can successfully configure remote monitoring, you should identify what variables need to be monitored and their allowable operational range. This requires some period of baselining to determine the allowable operational ranges. An initial baseline period of at least three months is not unusual when first identifying the operational ranges and defining thresholds, but baseline monitoring should continue over the life span of each monitored variable.
RMON Command-Line Interface
Junos OS provides two mechanisms you use to control the Remote Monitoring agent on the router: command-line interface (CLI) and SNMP. To configure an RMON entry using the CLI, include the following statements at the [edit snmp] hierarchy level:
If you do not have CLI access, you can configure remote monitoring using the SNMP Manager or management application, assuming SNMP access has been granted. (See Table 1.) To configure RMON using SNMP, perform SNMP Set requests to the RMON event and alarm tables.
RMON Event Table
Set up an event for each type that you want to generate. For example, you could have two generic events, rising and falling, or many different events for each variable that is being monitored (for example, temperature rising event, temperature falling event, firewall hit event, interface utilization event, and so on). Once the events have been configured, you do not need to update them.
Table 1: RMON Event Table
Field | Description |
|---|---|
eventDescription | Text description of this event |
eventType | Type of event (for example, log, trap, or log and trap) |
eventCommunity | Trap group to which to send this event (as defined in the Junos OS configuration, which is not the same as the community) |
eventOwner | Entity (for example, manager) that created this event |
eventStatus | Status of this row (for example, valid, invalid, or createRequest) |
RMON Alarm Table
The RMON alarm table stores the SNMP object identifiers (including their instances) of the variables that are being monitored, together with any rising and falling thresholds and their corresponding event indexes. To create an RMON request, specify the fields shown in Table 2.
Table 2: RMON Alarm Table
Field | Description |
|---|---|
alarmStatus | Status of this row (for example, valid, invalid, or createRequest) |
alarmInterval | Sampling period (in seconds) of the monitored variable |
alarmVariable | OID (and instance) of the variable to be monitored |
alarmValue | Actual value of the sampled variable |
alarmSampleType | Sample type (absolute or delta changes) |
alarmStartupAlarm | Initial alarm (rising, falling, or either) |
alarmRisingThreshold | Rising threshold against which to compare the value |
alarmFallingThreshold | Falling threshold against which to compare the value |
alarmRisingEventIndex | Index (row) of the rising event in the event table |
alarmFallingEventIndex | Index (row) of the falling event in the event table |
Both the alarmStatus and eventStatus fields are entryStatus primitives, as defined in RFC 2579, Textual Conventions for SMIv2.
Troubleshooting RMON
You troubleshoot the RMON agent, rmopd, that runs on the router by inspecting the contents of the Juniper Networks enterprise RMON MIB, jnxRmon, which provides the extensions listed in Table 3 to the RFC 2819 alarmTable.
Table 3: jnxRmon Alarm Extensions
Field | Description |
|---|---|
jnxRmonAlarmGetFailCnt | Number of times the internal Get request for the variable failed |
jnxRmonAlarmGetFailTime | Value of sysUpTime when the last failure occurred |
jnxRmonAlarmGetFailReason | Reason why the Get request failed |
jnxRmonAlarmGetOkTime | Value of sysUpTime when the variable moved out of failure state |
jnxRmonAlarmState | Status of this alarm entry |
Monitoring the extensions in this table provides clues as to why remote alarms may not behave as expected.
